Summer's coming.

They don't call it the Evergreen State for nothing.
Ah, what glory, the seasons! After what's been a relatively dry winter for Seattle, April unleashed days on end of relentless rain. This weekend, the sun finally emerged again - just in time to illuminate all the beautiful flowers and greenery that have blossomed under profuse watering last month.

Because all of my prior visits to Seattle occurred between late April and early June, I'd really had no concept of the Northwest during any season but the verdant, sunny one. In the past few rainy, gray months, I'd almost forgotten that I'm living in the same city with which I fell in love five years ago. But this weekend - with the skies blue and cloudless, the air crisp and humidity-free, the sliding glass walls of open-air cafes pushed aside to let in the summer breeze, and all the people outside basking in the sunshine - I was reminded.

Not that I don't still have some appreciation for the rain. Two friends from work, Jenica and James, and I miraculously all had a shared day off this week. Though I found what seemed like a great hike for us off of the infamous Mountain Loop Highway, my plans were foiled by a late-season snowstorm in the North Cascades. Instead, we stuck to lower elevations and went for a rainy trek to see Wallace Falls:


This area typically draws a lot of hiker traffic, but because of the weather, we had the trail and the falls pretty much to ourselves. And even though we missed out on some views due to the heavy mist, it was kind of nice to hike in fog; light rain can be really therapeutic, in ways...cleansing, renewing. And just a little more hardcore than your usual, sunny day hike :)


Supposedly, the Olympic Mountains are on the other side of all that mist.


The trees were gorgeous and stunning, as always.
Also: best trailhead sign ever. We had a photoshoot at it on our way out.




As with all good hikes, we finished up with - what else? - a trip to Grocery Outlet. There's one in Monroe, which happily, meant all new random surplus groceries to explore! Needless to say, we enjoyed some fantastic snacks on our drive back to the city...including: oatmeal raisin cookies, milk chocolate with sea salt almond nibs, and lots of tasty trail mix. Jenica needed to go home, but James and I rounded out the evening at an old favorite - the Hopvine Pub on Capitol Hill - for yummy soup and the beginning of open mic night.

I'm just happy summer is on its way - and for once, it won't mean 100+ degree temperatures and stifling humidity. Instead, it's going to mean: many more mountain adventures, fresh fruit smoothies, camp outs, backyard barbecues, summer concerts, long runs again, playing outside with friends, hiking the Grand Canyon this July, swimming in Lake Washington, riding my bike, and more mornings like this one: having no trouble waking up at 6 a.m. because sunshine was pouring through my windows.

Peace out, Seasonal Affective Disorder.

Adults are, like, this mess of sadness and phobias.

So, with many of the students I'm tutoring getting all revved up for SAT's and AP exams this month, I dove back into my journals from high school. In doing so, I recovered the following entry from the last month of my senior year of high school, and couldn't help but post it on my blog (with apologies to the privacy of my 17-year-old self.) It's uncanny how much, despite my predictions, I still relate to myself back then, and that darned obsession with musing over memory and the nature of identity.


---

Can't sleep...I CANNOT STOP THINKING ABOUT COLLEGE. And yes, I realize that I obsess often over that fact in this journal, that I rave repeatedly about how little time is left, how excited I am, so on and so forth. But it's like the reality of it (and simultaneously, the surrealism of it all) just keeps on hitting me like a wall of bricks...in a good way.

I keep thinking back to this time last year, when last year's senior class was absolutely fraught with senioritis - and how crazy it is to be in their shoes now - in the shoes of Camron and Katharina and Reshad and Allison and Desi and Josh and Brad and Jordy and Carly and everybody. Sure, I feel like a senior, but I guess because AP exams and yearbooks and the whole cap-and-gown deal have yet to actually manifest themselves as real parts of my life, I have a hard time grasping that THIS is really happening to me.

I remember those posters way back when that hung in some classrooms and said, "Ten years from now, it won't matter what jeans you wore..." blah blah - but it's true - I know that even as immediate and familiar and significant and REAL as my life feels to me right now, this is nothing in the scheme of things. I will go on and meet new people, gain and lose talents and hobbies, see new places, learn infinitely, and change and change and change...and someday, I will be somewhere, reading this entry and perhaps hardly even being able to relate to it or feel all that I feel at this point in my life. The halls of my high school will feel like antiques, and childish, only vestiges of familiarity remaining among their tiles and rooms and lockers and endless, endless circles. God, I can't wait to quit running around in circles.

You know what gets me? The estrangement I feel from my own memories - as if I witness them merely in a movie or a dream, not steadfast in reality. All of these things come back to me in bits - the smell of my body spray from middle school, an old favorite song, journal entries from the past, recalling books and TV shoes and magazines from years long gone - and even though these things are a part of me, they feel so foreign.

I have changed so much it scares me. I remember the pathetic lull of insecurity from my early soccer team days. I see pictures of myself at seven in my Tae Kwon Do uniform. I know what it is to feel deathly afraid of the world and still excited at the idea of a first kiss. It's this plethora of memories I have, and yet it feels like a storybook, an anthology of experiences that happened to someone else. And to think that in a few years, this very moment will fade from me as well, recede into the abyss of my memory, and eventually, come to feel entirely alien to me.

I am not sure if I am conveying any of this the way I wish to, and the abstract semantics are frustrating me...

Haagen Dazs For Cheap, and Other Adventures in the West

Spring is alive on Cougar Mountain!
So, I was supposed to run the Eugene marathon this morning. Sadly, that darn foot injury sidelining me all last month prevented the marathon-running, and instead, I spent today tutoring, grocery shopping, and attending a department meeting at work.

But no complaints, as my blessings still exist as such: I'm employed, able to afford my own groceries, and all healed up and able to run again! I went for a delightful trail run out on Cougar Mountain a few mornings ago...managed to drag myself out of bed at 5:15 a.m. to go squeeze a lovely jaunt in the woods in before a single other soul was on the trail.


I tried out a new trail - less trafficked than many of the trails along the I-90 corridor - and had only one minor disaster: didn't screw the lid on my water bottle quite tightly enough, so half of it leaked out inside my backpack in the first few minutes of my run...miraculously, my camera and phone survived the deluge...but my trail-running guide to Western Washington? Totally destroyed :( It's now four inches thick with wavy pages that still haven't fully dried out. Oops.

I also got to spend a fun evening with my (non-REI!) friend Elodie, helping her move into her new place, then going out for killer Mexican food in Kirkland (on the other side of Lake Washington from Seattle.) On a sidenote...I don't know how I manage to always make friends with crazy names, too, but it is a pattern in my life. Zanna and I went out to listen to some live music at the Comet Tavern on Capitol Hill last week, and in making quick friends with the guy running the hot dog cart outside the tavern (which we had access to from our booth via a sliding window), we got the familiar, amused, "Wait, your names are...whaaat?"

In my final moment of celebration for the week...I have discovered the joys of the west coast's Grocery Outlet. After almost a full year now living in a city whose cost of living is 32% higher than the US average, I am downright thrilled to discover a place where I can seriously slash my grocery bill. It's a store that carries overstock and surpluses, and though it was initially presented to me as a sketchy last resort for food (not-so-affectionately earning its nickname "Gross Out"), I've found that stereotype to be totally inaccurate. It *does* carry a bit of the haphazard vibe of Gibson's in Oberlin, and there's more of a need to be diligent about checking expirations - but there are also FANTASTIC deals, and on quality foods including organic produce, soy milk, teas, spices, fancy cheeses, microbrews, ice cream, Trader Joe's overstock, beef jerky (for 80% cheaper than anywhere else!), etc.

My haul for this week included:


- Baba Ghanoush! Haven't had this yummy stuff since Amsterdam!
- Trader Joe's goat cheese, half price, expiration still months away
- Smoked gouda cheese!
- Amy's (organic/vegetarian) frozen entrees, half price
- Haagen Dazs pint for ONE DOLLAR AND FORTY-NINE CENTS.

I am speechless - and fully planning to post regularly here about my weekly G.O. finds :) As well as my continued love for the trails...


Life is feeling good again.

META Blog: Reflections on life in a blogcentric society

Here's to an atypical blog post this week.

I pose the following open-ended questions to my readers: What should be the function of a personal blog? How personal is too personal? Is it dishonest, as a blogger, to provide only the most superficial of windows into one's daily life?

I bring this up because of a recent complaint that my blog is disingenuously full of positive things, even when the truth is that the past few months have been a pretty trying time, emotionally, for me...and that (this, in a moment of projected psychoanalysis on the part of my critic, who shall remain anonymous) my blog has caused me to unnaturally stress myself out with a need to prove that I'm living life to the fullest.

So. I'd like to address that here, because I think it was a valid comment, and it's a fascinating opportunity to explore the psychology of blogging. First of all: regardless of what I'm trying or not trying to prove to my readers, the primary function of my blog, for my own purposes, is...stress relief! When life gets crazy and out of control and feels too much like I'm moving numbly through the daily grind, getting to meditate aloud in my blog on the positive adventures in my life gives me a sense of calm, happy clarity amidst the storm. It allows the joy of an all-day hike in the mountains to continue bringing me joy long after the hike itself is over. It gives me tangible evidence from the past few months that despite working way too much, I am still human!

Sure, there are plenty of more "personal" topics I'd love to write about in public space...but everything must be weighed against a sense of protection for the emotional privacy of those close to me, as well as gauging the appropriateness of revealing anything, given the completely open nature of the internet. I may have grown up in a generation of fearless, internet-savvy kids with a false sense of privacy about blogging (who was around to read my old Xanga?), but I no longer pretend that I can ignore the notion of an audience.

I write pretty much every one of my blog posts with, at the very minimum, the following POTENTIAL readers in mind: my parents, my grandmother, students I tutor, my own past teachers and professors, current work supervisors/managers/bosses (who've been known to peruse my blog using airport wi-fi on their way to Hawaii...hi Michael!), potential future employers, babysitting charges from my past, random strangers, close friends, acquaintances, OutdoorsNW readers, exes, people who may or may not have given me a t-shirt in high school with the phrase "Life is full of rainbows!" to make a statement about my sometimes obnoxious tendency to be overly optimistic in all situations...

GoogleAnalytics tells me that I have readers in Italy, Ecuador, Switzerland, Luxembourg, China (hi Daniel!), Australia, and the United Arab Emirates, among other places. I have the most readers in Washington state, followed by New York, followed by Ohio...It's strange to think that I don't even know who reads each entry; it literally could be anybody.

Frankly, anything written with an audience in mind is not going to be a 100% objective, honest account - not the way my personal journal is (and who can say if that, even, is "objective"? I'm aware that I frequently go back and read old journal entries, so perhaps even my own private journal is written for the audience of my future self...hmm.) It's part of the aggravating nature of social networking sites, blogs included...it's personal information, written for someone else's consumption. Even the statement "I don't care what people think of me", so ubiquitous in Facebook profile About Me sections, is inherently false - if you truly didn't care, you wouldn't need to assert so.

But enough rambling. Here's the bottom line: I don't want this blog to feel "disingenuous" to its readers. If it does, it does a disservice to life and the nature of experience altogether. Life *is* messy, and I acknowledge that. I don't claim, at all, that my blog reflects an accurate and balanced account of my life. If you're interested in the messier parts, there's this old-fashioned thing called talking that I'd be happy to do with you! But for the big, wide world?

Rainbows it is :)

Lake Serene, Baseball, and Missing Kitty Shenanigans

Can rainbows redeem my lack of blog entries in a couple weeks?
At Camba's recommendation, Alan and I hiked to the scenic Bridal Veil Falls and Lake Serene yesterday. It was a gorgeous day for it, and in keeping with my promise to myself to rein in my schedule, I had a whole day off to enjoy the outing. Good thing, too, as it being the last day of ski season at Stevens Pass made Highway 2 an absolute mess to get back on in the evening. Alan and I wound up stopping in the tiny town of Gold Bar for post-hike burgers to try and wait out the traffic jam heading back west - an effort that helped mildly, but which we supplemented with GPS navigation to make our way back on winding, county roads rather than sitting in standstill traffic on Highway 2. (Appropriately, Cake's "Long Line of Cars" came on my stereo's IPod shuffle during all this.) Overall, the drive back was more or less a trial effort in our plans for summer of 2011 to drive Alan's 1968 Chevelle from Ohio to Seattle, avoid interstates and chain restaurants, taking scenic state roads instead and exploring Mom-and-Pop places the whole way.


Bridal Veil Falls.
But back to the hike itself. We had a phenomenal time on the mountain - gorgeous, sunny weather that greeted us at the trailhead with spring warmth, but rewarded us with cooler breezes in the denser, shadier forests toward the top.


The route we hiked, about 8 miles roundtrip, traversed everything from scenic valley overlooks off the sides of sloping mountains to dense old-growth forest, from picturesque, cascading waterfalls to deep, slippery snowfields.




Understandably, there were many others out on the trail, but we also had large stretches to ourselves, including a quiet, secluded bench by the side of the still-snow-covered Lake Serene at the top.


In other adventures of late: We went to our first Mariners game on Saturday evening, and watched a decent victory over Detroit. (Sadly, I had to work until 3 p.m. and so missed out on the Sounders' triumph over Kansas City earlier that day.) We walked to the stadium from our apartment in the pouring rain and even soaked as we were by the time we got there, felt lucky to not have to mess with stadium parking.


Although I still maintain that soccer games are approximately 300 times as exciting and exhilarating to watch as baseball games, I nevertheless enjoyed the novelty of what was probably my second professional baseball game ever :)

And, in misadventures of the week...Chloe has been getting herself into all kinds of reckless trouble. Two days ago, we returned home to find that she'd somehow managed to more or less strangled herself with a plastic bag (notably, with a "Keep away from infants and small children" warning label on it...but what of cats?)


And this morning, we slept in and had a conversation a bit like this:

Alan: Hey, did you hear that racket Chloe was making in the kitchen last night?
Me: (Laughs) Yes...she's crazy.

Then it slowly seemed to dawn us both that it was late in the morning and no kitty had come pawing at our faces for breakfast (a daily event that almost always chronologically beats my alarm clock.)

Me: Chloe?

And...nothing. I got up in horror, searching the apartment high and low, before realizing we'd left a tiny window in the bedroom just barely cracked to let in the breeze last night - and sure enough, there were tiny kitty pawprints in the dust on the ledge outside of it. My heart sunk.

I can write about it now with some lightness, but let's be honest - I was a serious wreck this morning, walking dejectedly around the block with Alan, shaking some food in a tupperware bowl and imagining all the miserably, lonely mornings ahead without my beloved kitty cat. Our neighbor across the hall saw us poking around behind the apartment and mentioned that Chloe had jumped up on the ledge of their bedroom window at about 6:30 this morning, scaring the living daylights out of their dog, Lucy. They hadn't seen her since.

After several laps around the block and no hope in sight, Alan and I returned to the apartment. Plodding up the staircase to our back porch, with tears just on the verge of pouring out my ducts...there she was: Chloe, wedged almost completely out of sight, down between the back stairs and the adjacent trellis. There were leaves and twigs all over her face, her claws were out, her body taut and shaking slightly. Not a motion had been made on her part when we'd shaken her food container multiple times within a few yards of her. Our best guess is that Lucy must have barked up a storm this morning and scared Chloe so badly that she'd stayed frozen in hiding there until we found there.

Here I'd been imagining her having all sorts of adventures in the big city, feasting in dumpsters, nuzzling strangers' ankles and trotting off down to Pioneer Square without me...but there she'd been, about eight feet away from our back door, waiting in frozen terror for God knows what. Regardless, I'm relieved to have my kitty back home safe again, doing somersaults all over my lesson books as I attempt to prep my tutoring lessons. I can only hope her kitty shenanigans will mellow back out in the coming weeks...


Postscript: Trees in the Northwest are awesome.

Mood Management: Asparagus, Books, and the Caprice of Clouds

Cooking adventures continue!
As a first-time spring Seattleite, I have to say...the weather here this month has been one capricious beast. (See how tutoring SAT vocab is rubbing off on me?) It will go from sunshine to stormy winds to full-on hail to sunshine again, interspersed with 45-second blasts of pouring rain throughout. Mostly, it's just been cool and overcast a lot, but filled with the confusing presence of blooming flowers and spring birds chirping. I don't know what to make of it. The general lack of sunshine, though, the past few weeks might be getting to me a little bit...or it might still just be my crazy hours. I've felt calmer lately in general, though. A little worn down, but mostly content. My foot's starting to show signs of healing, so that's a plus.

I'm working to keep up momentum in initiating positive change in my life, as much as possible...we'll see what direction the next few months take me, but I am simultaneously happy with where I am now and exhilarated by the possibilities for the future.

Some (temporary for now, for however long I need) commitments to myself I've made, as of yesterday:

- Read more. (Currently on my coffee table: Lorrie Moore's "Birds of America", which someone once recommended to me as the absolute best collection of short stories ever written. I can't even remember who gave me the recommendation, but I bought the book years ago and have let it sit on my shelf since. To its credit, I didn't give it away with the 70% of my books that didn't make it out to Seattle with me, but...it just takes a lot to get me to read short stories. I generally find them horribly unsatisfying...I don't like the constant goodbyes with characters I'm just barely starting to get to know. But this collection really is ridiculously good. My writing might even get pushed back into a fiction kick for awhile because of it...
- Keep a more manageable work schedule; No more months without days off.
- Tea instead of coffee, indefinitely.
- No allowing running injuries to keep me from being active. Usually, if I can't run, I just give up on physical activity altogether; the all-or-nothing personality in me is too busy being upset about not being able to run. So I really haven't done much lately - but I went for a long, brutally windy bike ride yesterday, and did an intense Power Hour at the gym this morning, and OI VEY have I missed endorphins!
- No junk food, also indefinitely. This includes chips, cookies, candy, ice cream, French fries, sweet pastries, etc...

I've tried going halfway on that last one, but I'm still making far too many compromises. I've spent six years wishing I were a health nut, and I'm just tired of wishing, instead of being. I quit junk food for a 70-day period my senior year of high school, and it was a good thing for not just my body, but my moods and soul as well. So I'm giving it a try again. So far, so good. My meals yesterday:

Breakfast: Oatmeal with raisins, cranberries, cinnamon and walnuts

Lunch: Rottini pasta with cherry tomatoes, peas and asparagus (CSA-share-food Alert!)

Snacky-poos: Apple, Carrots (CSA-share-food Alert!) with hummus

Dinner: Buckwheat pasta with mizuna (CSA-share-food Alert!), onions and walnuts

The sauce in progress.
Dessert: Vanilla yogurt with slivered almonds, fresh strawberries and agave nectar

Today so far, I had oatmeal again for breakfast, and for lunch, a banana/blueberry/strawberry smoothie and a ridiculously tasty salmon burger on a pita with fresh cucumber (CSA-share-food Alert!), tomato slices and tartar sauce. Yummy. Healthy food is awesome.

Feelin' good...

Music shoutout of the week: James Vincent McMorrow.

From Farm to Yitka's Kitchen

Homemade zucchini bread.
This week, something big is happening: I will have my first day off from work (all jobs considered) in TWENTY-SEVEN DAYS. I didn't actually realize how ridiculous my schedule had gotten until I sat down today to look at my iCal, and realized, holy cow...I've been swamped. I'm working full time at REI, tutoring four students, proctoring the occasional SAT at local high schools, cleaning Vera once a week (in exchange for free training sessions), and doing some writing here and there. Though not much blogging, apparently...

I'm pooped. It's exacerbated by the fact that I'm battling some severe bruising (Metatarsals? Bone bruise? Not quite sure...) on my right foot...I didn't even hurt it while running, but it's kept me sidelined from my passion for three weeks and counting now. Bummer. After writing an article on the Eugene Marathon, I registered for it this spring...but it's less than a month away now, and I'm pretty sure my injury's left me in no place to run it. Needless to say, the lack of running during this rather hectic stretch in my life has left me a little stir-crazy.

Nevertheless, I'm determined as ever to always carve out the requisite relaxation time. There definitely hasn't been enough of it lately, but I *have* done some nice bonus activities here and there. I finished reading Barbara Kingsolver's "Animal Vegetable Miracle", about her family's decision to live on a farm and eat only locally grown food for a whole year. It's a wonderful book - funny, enthralling, poetic, inspiring, poignant all - and one that's been on my reading list since Seyeon and I went down to Austin, Texas about a year and a half ago and I saw it on the bookshelf of the delightful folks from Couchsurfing.com with whom we stayed. That week in Austin was one of blissful vacation in the midst of the only time in my life that I've been even busier and more stressed out than I am now, in the middle of my final semester at Oberlin and 5K-race organization effort. The book went on my "Things I Want to Do/Read When I Have a Life Again" List.

So, having finally read it, I felt (as I'm sure most of its readers have/do/will) inspired to get more in touch with the world of local agriculture. It's kind of scary how out of touch the modern, industrial grocery store has made us with the very thing that sustains us in this world, let alone how much less flavorful and nutrient-rich our typical grocery store fare is today than it was years ago. And all the waste that's involved with shipping food halfway around the world just so we can eat strawberries in January...anyway. A great read that definitely reinforced my desire not only to build my food knowledge but also to work on honing my cooking skills. My first step was to sign up for a CSA (Community-Supported Agriculture) share: a box every other week of fresh, organic produce from a local farm.


My first box!
I did this for awhile with my housemates the summer I lived in Oberlin, but that was back when I was still intimidated by unfamiliar vegetables - so I feel like the CSA was of little use to me back then. But now I'm all about experimenting and learning in the kitchen, so the prospect of a box of new ingredients to explore - or just familiar ones that I don't go out of my way to buy at the grocery store. Like, in the case of this week...zucchini! Hence the tasty loaf at the top of this entry.


Bonus: Chloe gets a boat to play in after I've unloaded all the produce into my fridge.
Other triumphs in the past week:
- Alan bought his own truck, and thus will be able to be home much more often soon!
- I hosted a girls' night/dinner party a couple evenings ago...delightful.
- I bought plane tickets to Cleveland this spring. So excited to see old friends!
- Also finished reading Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood." Excellent read.
- I played Wii for the first time at Easter at Gale's house (where I also spent Thanksgiving...hooray for Gale's family's sponsorship of orphan holidays) and failed at pretty much everything except WiiFit Hula Hooping...in which I was a "Calorie Incinerator." Awesome.
- I got my first pieces of non-footwear REI gear: my very own packable, 2-person tent and a cozy sleeping bag.


And Chloe approves.